One of the toughest skills improve when you first start playing guitar is strumming. Many beginning guitar players struggle with gaining control of their pick hand. As a result, they find that they are unable to play anything well. One of the main reasons that they are having this issue is that they don’t practice controlling the pick hand. Not being able to control the pick hand makes it hard to be efficient in the picking motion.

Examples of inefficient picking:

Using a different picking motion for upstrokes than they do for downstrokes

Completely ignoring using upstrokes altogether and just using downstrokes

‘Swinging’ at the strings instead of using a controlled picking motion to pick/strum

Picking Motion

In order to gain better control of your picking hand you must first observe your picking motion as it is right now without making any changes to it. To do this you will need to play something at a slow speed (again without making any changes to how you play it) to observe. Use a few different musical examples and take note of what you notice about your picking hand.

Once you have noted your observations, practice controlling your picking motion. You do this by making your upstrokes and downstrokes look identical in how you pick the strings. There should be no rotation of the wrist when going to an upstroke from a downstroke and vice versa. Practice this very slowly as you will default back to whatever way you were playing before if you go too fast.

Completely Ignoring Upstrokes

One of the most common mistakes beginning guitar players make is to ignore practicing upstrokes. They rely solely on downstrokes to play everything. Your pick hand will benefit from practicing and using upstrokes in your guitar playing.

Benefits of practicing upstrokes:

Smoother playing (both rhythm and lead guitar playing)

Increase the speed of your downstroke

Arpeggiated chords are much cleaner

Make practicing upstrokes part of your regular practice routine. Practice them in isolation for a small amount of time during your practice session. In a short amount of time you will see an increase in both your pick hand speed but also the cleanliness of your overall guitar playing

Swinging at the strings instead of using a controlled picking motion

This happens a lot at the beginning because most guitar players at this stage haven’t given a second thought to the pick hand. This is to totally normal. At this point it is just so cool to be able to play the guitar and have something sounding musical coming out.

It is also at this point where you should start paying attention to the pick hand. You want to make sure that your picking motion is controlled. If you start the habit now it will make your playing much better in the long run than guitar players who do not do this. Start doing this in the same way as mentioned in the section about picking motion. Remember to take your time with doing this and don’t rush it. Resist trying to play too fast and resist the urge to gloss over mistakes.

Follow these steps and in no time at all you will notice your ability to play your guitar will improve greatly.